The 'it' in Losing It is the virginity of an attractive 19-year-old named Lucy, and Ranjit Bolt has chosen to relate her story in verse. Iambic tetrametric couplets, to be precise, although Bolt gives himself plenty of poetic licence with the form. The subtitle of the book - 'An adult fairytale for those/ Who've tired of fairytales in prose' - makes it sound like a rhythmic 'Reader's Wives' involving witch outfits and rubber toads, which isn't far from the truth.

Lucy, a sweet young thing from the provinces, is fed up with her long-preserved virginity, and goes to live with her Great Aunt Alicia (hooked nose, pointy hat, broomstick) in London. The capital, she reasons, must be well stocked with potential cherry-pickers. Alicia lives in a Gothic manse just off Hampstead Heath, replete with gargoyles, barn-owls, nightjars, a sepulchral butler and a black cat. She has no issues with Lucy using her house as a base for her campaign:

Over the course of the novel our heroine tries out six beaux, but with each one something goes amiss at the eleventh hour. Richard, a middle-aged depressive, turns out to be an ex- of Great Aunt Alicia, who takes swift and belated revenge by turning him into a hare and releasing him onto Hampstead Heath. The egregiously erudite Algernon falls for Lucy when she plays a nimble tune on a virginal, but then misplaces his condoms at the crucial moment. Mungo, a Wildean dandy who wears a milk-white kimono of Kyoto silk, is wedded to art and bats for neither side.

Then there are the three famous lovers. Alicia's magic broomstick allows Lucy to travel in time in her search for Mr Right. Dick Turpin, who turns out to be a jolly nice chap and not the ruffian that history has constructed him as, is the most considerate of Lucy's almost-lovers:

Is it yer first time, wench?' he said, 'Ah, well, tis nothin' ye need dread'.

But an excess of wine, consumed in the Spaniard's Inn, means Dick's dick won't stand and deliver.

'Me cursed yard-arm, damn its eyes! Damn the Madeira! Damn it all!"

Julius Caesar is stabbed by Brutus before he has time to veni-vidi-vici Lucy. By far the funniest of her clinches involves Casanova:

He must be good; he's Casanova - He's famed for it the whole world over

He convinces Lucy to attempt The Scorpion With Two Backs, a fiendishly complicated sexual position from a Sanskrit treatise on the art of love. The pair end up locked in a concupiscent cat's-cradle of legs, arms and other things, and have to be lubricated apart by 12 pats of melted butter.

The verse novel is a rare beast in today's publishing jungle. It is the Procrustean bed of narrative forms: novelistic qualities such as plot and character tend to get stretched or lopped to fit the demands of the poetic form. The most successful recent example is Vikram Seth's virtuosic The Golden Gate (1986), 690 tetrametric Shakespearean sonnets about Californian twentysomethings and their imaginatively named pets: a genuinely impressive feat of verbal dexterity. Losing It doesn't bear comparison, but then it doesn't have any particularly literary aspirations.

It's just splendidly silly stuff, in which the gags are kept coming by the rhythm and rhyme (couplets being the correct form for a story about coupling). North Londoners will enjoy Bolt's transformation of Hampstead Heath into a Wuthering-Heightsesque stretch of moonlit wilderness, though his 'satiric' swipes at London life can be toe-curlingly ham-fisted:

While the crowds passing to and fro In almost a cloacal flow Disgust one as they mill along, With bad manners, and their pong.

There's a discreet lack of anatomical detail, and asterisks act as fig-leafs for the very few naughty words. It's not quite the sort of book you'd let your children read, but not far off. Bolt's achievement is to write a lubricious romp about a virgin on the offensive, without ever verging on the offensive.